Sandpaper trick saves $500 on head gasket job

Step 1: Sandpaper Trick Saves $500 on Head Gasket Job

Ok, so my buddy rich he blew his head gasket on his car. So here we are, dismantling the car, and pulling off all the parts to get to the head. Going to start to take up the rocker arms. And of course the bolts to the head. So ahead and disconnect all of these things. Here we go with the head, pull it off and now let's take a look at this head gasket you can see it's blown through.

Step 2:

So here's the magic to the whole situation is we put down about five dollars worth the sandpaper and you can see how we're starting to make some progress with the sandpaper. Now we’re going to take the 80 grit off, and we’re going to put 150 on it to kind of finish it up. And you want to work it until is just exactly perfect. You can see there's no lines at this point and it is darn near perfect at this point. Here's a feeler gauge so we just check it from different configuration and you can see the feeler gauges not popping through anywhere.

Step 3:

So we were real happy about this and you know for ten dollars and sandpaper that's great. Now we're going to take the valves off since we've got everything apart and we're going to use a drill to put them lapping compound on there. And just kind of clean everything up so, when we do put it all back together it’s legit and ready to go. See how the grooves are taken out. Just keep working those and now we're going to go ahead and put some new valve seals on.

Step 4:

Of course having everything apart you know it's really not that expensive to put valve seals on and the head gasket really just a couple hundred bucks into this project and of course labor, our labor. This sandpaper trick probably saved about four to five hundred dollars and now that we have the car back together it purrs like a kitten.